Blog for the RepRap project at www.reprap.org - a project to create an open-source self-copying 3D printer. To get all the early posts on this blog with all the images as a single PDF visit this page.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Where it all began...

Your correspondent on holiday in Ironbridge in Shropshire. This is where Abraham Darby first managed to smelt iron with coke (rather than charcoal), an invention that has as much claim as any to have started the Industrial Revolution.

Though, in reality, that revolution started more or less simultaneously in many places in England, you really get a sense of the historical significance of it here. In particular you can see how, in what is now a sleepy small town, the late eighteenth century must have felt just like Silicon Valley did in the 1980s.

In the reconstructed village set sixty years or so later at Blists Hill just up the road, they have a number of working stationary steam engines - my third favourite machines after tall ships and (of course) RepRap.

I recall studying the introduction of cast and wrought iron into construction eons ago when I was a lowly undergraduate in architecture. Iron Bridge was one of the artifacts that I had to learn to recognise. That work really was the bleeding edge of the time. Fascinating stuff.:-)